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vulgar late romantIcIsm. Schoenberg's public demonstration of a
self-proclaimed revolution in esthetics did not take place at the
fin-de-siecle but rather during the interwar years. Mahler rejected,
for himself, the more forward-looking "total work of art" of Wagner,
the opera, and the new political, programmatic aspects of music. As
a committed, re-creating performer, he saw his creative work as part
of a sustained continuum from the past, despite the modernist
dimensions of his work so frequently cited today . Mahler's
contemporaries saw confusion , vulgarity, and incompetence in his
work rather than "newness" or "modernity ." Bruckner took refuge in
traditional Catholicism. Mahler sought bittersweet inspiration in so–
called banal popular themes , in an eclectic use of popular dance and
band sounds, in Mozartian irony , in the symphony and in the song.
Schoenberg, who started under the sway of Brahms, saw the twelve–
tone system as a renewal of rigor and clarity in music, as a refuge
from the cheap sentimentality and decadence of eclectic and
imitative contemporary music making. Theirs was a traditional and
backward-looking modernism of sorts , one in search of a classicism,
and a wholly apolitical one . Compare what has happened in modern
music in America. John Harbison and George Crumb , two major
composers of our time, seek an almost sentimental, if not wistful,
modernism by generating accessible , pleasing effects and sonorities .
Other composers like David del Tredici, George Rochberg, and
Frederick Rzewski have rejected the avant-garde and seek artistic
solace in quotes from the past, and in older idioms and styles .
Nostalgia reigns supreme in our musical audience . Like the
Viennese audience of 1900, the concert-going public today has an
increasingly short tolerance for the new , and relishes the older
repertoire - baroque, classical, and romantic works and sounds.
In the plastic arts , the interest in Viennese painting and crafts
reveals a comparable apolitical and regressive attitude towards the
new and the future . Much of what is now popular about Klimt and
the Vienna Secession is their blend of ornament and symbolism,
their subtle prettiness . An eclectic effort to decorate every detail of
life , from lettering to tableware to buildings, pervaded Viennese art.
The art of that period , notably the portraiture , is personal and
inward-looking, rarely revolutionary in artistic technique or style. It
is only superficially "modern ." It is easy to look at and not too
dangerous . In America, the craft movement and the growth of
interest in weaving and ceramics had political significance ten years
ago in its implicit rejection of industry, the city, and capitalism. It
